The Cider House Rules (39 page)

'One year I told the niggers that they should just stick their joints into these rubbers if they didn't want to be catchin' diseases or havin' any new babies,' Herb said. He grabbed Louise's finger in the rubber sheath and held it out for everyone to see. 'And the next year, all the niggers told me that the rubbers didn't work. They said they stuck their fingers in there, like I showed 'em, and they
still
got diseases and new babies every time they turned around!'

No one laughed; no one believed it; it was an old joke to all of them, except to Homer Wells; and the idea of people having babies every time they turned around was not especially funny to Homer.

When Herb Fowler offered to drive them all to the diner on Drinkwater Road for a hot lunch, Homer said he didn't want to go; Mrs. Worthington made his lunch, and Wally's, every morning, and Homer felt obliged to eat his—he always enjoyed it. He also knew the crew was not supposed to leave the orchards for a lunch break, especially not in any of the Ocean View vehicles, and Herb Fowler was driving the green van that Olive used most often. It wasn't a
hard
rule, but Homer knew that if Wally had been working in the cider house Herb wouldn't have suggested it.

Homer ate his lunch, appropriately, in the cider house kitchen; when he glanced into the long room with the two rows of narrow beds, he thought how much the rolled mattresses and blankets resembled people sleeping {313} there—except the shapes upon the iron beds were too still to be sleepers. They are like bodies waiting to be identified, thought Homer Wells.

Even though it was raining, he went outside to look at the collection of dead cars and junked tractor-and-trailer parts that festooned the dirt driveway in front of the cider house. In the back was a churned-up area of discolored weeds where the mash, or the pornace,
was
flung after the press. A pig farmer from Waldoboro drove all the way just to have it, Meany Hyde had told Homer; the mash was great for pigs.

Some of the dead cars had South Carolina plates. Homer Wells had never looked at a map of the United States; he had seen a globe, but it was crude one—the states weren't marked. He knew South Carolina was; a long way south; the Negroes came from there in trucks, Meany Hyde had said, or they drove their own oars, but some of their cars were so old and beaten up that they died here; Meany wasn't sure how all the Negroes got back to South Carolina.

'They pick grapefruits down in Florida, I think,' Meany said, 'and peaches when it's peach time somewhere else, and apples here. They travel around, just pickin'things.'

Homer watched a sea gull that was watching him from the roof of the cider house; the gull was so drawn in upon itself that Homer was reminded it was raining arid went back inside.

He rolled down one of the mattresses and stretched out on it, placing both the pillow and the blanket under his head. Something invited him to smell the blanket and the pillow, but he could detect nothing more than the aura of vinegar and a scent he categorized as simply old. The blanket and pillow felt more human than they :;melled, but the deeper he pushed his face into them, the more human their smell became. He thought about the strain on Louise Tobey's face, and how her finger had stretched itself out in the rubber, and the way her nail had looked {314} ready to slice through. He recalled the mattress in the sawyers' lodge in St. Cloud's, where Melony had introduced him to the way he felt now. He took himself out of his work jeans and masturbated quickly, the springs of the old iron bed creaking sharply. Something in his vision seemed clearer after he had finished. When he sat up on the bed, he spotted the other body that had taken the liberty of resting in the cider house. Even with her body curled so tightly in upon itself—like the gull in the rain or like a fetus or like a woman with cramps—Homer had no trouble recognizing Grace Lynch.

Even if she hadn't been watching him, even if she'd never been turned in his direction, she surely could not have mistaken the rhythm of the old bed springs—or even, Homer thought, the detectable sharpness of the odor of the semen he cupped in his hand. He stepped quietly outdoors and held his hand out in the rain. The sea gull, still huddled on the cider house roof, took a sudden interest in him—there was a history of successful scavenging associated with this place. When Homer went back in the cider house, he saw that Grace Lynch had fixed her mattress the way it had been and was standing by the window with her face pressed into the curtain. You had to look twice to see Grace Lynch; he wouldn't have seen her standing there if he hadn't already known she was in the room.

'I been there,' Grace Lynch said softly, without looking at Homer. 'Where you come from,' she explained. 'I been there—I don't know how you managed a night's sleep.'

Her thinness was especially sharp, even knifelike in what dead, gray light the rainy day provided at that window; she drew the faded curtain around her narrow shoulders like a shawl. She wouldn't look at Homer Wells, and nothing in her brittle, shivering stance could have been interpreted as beckoning, yet Homer felt himself drawn to her—in the way we are urged, especially in gloomy weather, to seek the familiar. In St. Cloud's, {315} one grew accustomed to victims, and the attitude of a victim shone stronger than reflected sunlight from Grace Lynch. Homer felt such a contradictory glow shining forth from her that he was impelled to go to her and hold her limp, damp hands.

'Funny,' she whispered, still not looking at him. 'It was so awful there., I felt real safe.' She put her head on his chest and stuck her sharp knee between his legs, twisting her bony hip into him. 'Not like here,' she whispered. 'It's dangerous here.' Her thin bony hand slipped into his pants, as skittish as a lizard.

The noisy arrival of the green van containing the escapees—to a hot lunch—saved him. Like a startled cat, Grace sprang crazily away from him, When they all came through the door, she was digging the grit from a seam in the linoleum on the kitchen counter—using a wire brush that Homer hadn't noticed she'd had in her hip pocket. Like so much of Grace Lynch, it had been concealed. But the tension in the look she gave him at quitting time—when he rode back to the apple mart on Big Dot Taft's jolly lap—was enough to tell Homer Wells that whatever was 'dangerous' had not deserted Grace Lynch and that he could travel far but never so far that the victims of St. Cloud's would ever desert him.

The night after Grace Lynch attacked him, Homer had his first date with Debra Pettigrew; it was also the first time he went to the drive-in movie with Candy and Wally. They all went in Senior's Cadillac. Homer and Debra Pettigrew sat in the splotched back seat where only a couple of months ago poor Curly Day had lost control of himself; Homer was unaware that the purpose of drive-in movies was, ultimately, for losing control of oneself in the back seats of cars.

'Homer's never been to a drive-in before,' Wally announced to Debra Pettigrew when they picked her up. The Pettigrews were a large family who kept dogs—many {316} dogs, mostly chained; some were chained to the bumpers of the several undriven, believed-to-be-dead cars that so permanently occupied the front lawn that the grass grew through the drive shafts and the axle bearings. As Homer stepped gingerly around the snapping dogs en route to Debra's front door, the dogs lunged against the unbudging cars.

The Pettigrews were a large family in both numbers and in flesh; Debra's fetching chubbiness was but a slight reminder of the family's potential for girth. At the door, Debra's mother greeted Homer massively—she of the monstrous genes responsible for the likes of Debra's sister, Big Dot Taft.

'De-BRA!' shrieked Debra's mother. 'It's your BEAU! Hi, sweetie-pie,' she said to Homer. 'I've heard all about how nice you are, and what good manners you've got— please excuse the mess.' Debra, blushing beside her, tried to hurry Homer outside as forcefully as her mother wished to usher him in. He glimpsed several huge people —some with remarkably swollen faces, as if they'd lived half their lives underwater or had survived incredible beatings; all with wide, friendly smiles, which contradicted the untold viciousness of the dogs barking in such a frenzy at Homer's back.

'We have to go, Mom,' Debra whined, shoving Homer out the door. 'We can't be late.'

'Late for
what?'
someone cackled from the house, which shook with heavy laughter; coughs followed, which were followed by labored sighing before the dogs erupted in such force that Homer thought the noise of them would be sufficient to keep him and Debra from ever reaching the Cadillac.

'Shut up!' Debra yelled at the dogs. They all stopped, but only for a second.

When Wally said, 'Homer's never been to a drive-in before,' he had to shout to be heard over the dogs.

'I've never been to a movie before,' Homer admitted.

'Gosh,' said Debra Pettigrew. She smelled nice; she {317} was much neater and cleaner than she looked in her apple-mart clothes; Debra dressed with a certain pert orderliness for working, too. Her chubbiness was restrained, and as they drove to Cape Kenneth, her usual good nature emerged so warmly that even her shyness disappeared—she was a
fun
girl, as they say in Maine. She was nice-looking, relaxed, good-humored, hardworking and not very smart. Her prospects, at best, included marriage to someone pleasant and not a great deal older or smarter than herself.

In the summers, the Pettigrews occupied one of the new houses on the overcrowded, mucky shore of Drinkwater Lake; they'd managed to make the new place look lived-in—on its rapid way to ramshackle—almost instantly. The lawn had appeared to grow its dead cars overnight, and the dogs had survived the move from the Pettigrews' winter house in Kenneth Corners without losing a bit of their territorial savagery. Like all the cottages around Drinkwater Lake, the Pettigrews' had been named—as if the houses themselves were orphans, delivered incomplete and in need of further creation. The Pettigrews' house was named 'All of Us!'

'The exclamation point is what kills me,' Wally had said to Homer when they pulled up at the car-and-dog lot. 'As if they're proud of their overpopulation.' But Wally was very respectful once Debra joined them in the car.

This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people —because surely, Wally was nice—would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At St. Cloud's, criticism was plainer—and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.

The drive-in movie in Cape Kenneth was nearly as new to Maine as the Haven Club's heated pool and was a lot less practical. Drive-in movies would never be a great idea for Maine; the night fog along the coast lent to many {318} a joyful film the inappropriately ghoulish atmosphere of a horror movie. In later years, people groping for rest rooms and the snack bar would fail to find their cars when they attempted to return to them.

The other problem was mosquitoes. In 194-, when Homer Wells went to his first drive-in movie, the hum of the mosquitoes in the night air of Cape Kenneth was far more audible than the sound track. Wally was relatively successful in preventing the mosquitoes from taking over the. car because he always brought with him an aerosol pump sprayer with which he frequently doused the car —and the air surrounding the cars. The pump can was loaded with the insecticide they sprayed the apples with. Thus the air in and surrounding the Cadillac was rendered poisonous and foul but fairly free of mosquitoes. The hiss and stench of the spray aroused frequent complaints from Wally's fellow moviegoers in the cars nearest the Cadillac—until they were being bitten so badly by mosquitoes that they stopped protesting; some of them politely asked if they could borrow the device for the purpose of poisoning their own cars.

There was no snack bar at the Cape Kenneth drive-in in 194-, and there were no rest rooms. The men and boys took turns urinating against a dank cement wall at the rear of the drive-in pit; atop the wall were perched several small and uncouth boys (Cape Kenneth locals, too young or too poor for cars), who used the wall to watch the movie even though they were well beyond the possibility of hearing it. Occasionally, when the movie was dissatisfying, they peed from the top of the wall onto the luckless people who were peeing against it.

Girls and women were not expected to pee at the drive-in, and consequently were better behaved than the men and boys—the women drank less, for example, although their behavior inside the cars could not be monitored.

It was wondrous—this whole experience—for Homer Wells. He was especially acute at noticing what human {319} beings did for pleasure—what (there could be no mistake about it) they
chose
to do—because he had come from a place where choice was not so evident, and examples of people performing for pleasure were not plentiful. It amazed him that people suffered drive-in movies by choice, and for pleasure; but he believed that, if he failed to see the fun in it, it was entirely his failure.

What he was most unprepared for was the movie itself. After people honked their horns and blinked their headlights and exhibited other less endearing forms of impatience — heard what was, unmistakably, the sound of someone vomiting against a fender—a gigantic image filled the sky. It is something's mouth! thought Homer Wells. The camera backed, or rather, lurched away. Something's head—a kind of horse! thought Homer Wells. It was a camel, actually, but Homer Wells had never seen a camel, or a picture of one; he thought it was a horribly deformed horse—a mutant horse! Perhaps some ghastly fetus-phase of a horse! The camera staggered back farther. Mounted by the camel's grotesque hump was a black-skinned man almost entirely concealed in white wrapping—bandages! thought Homer Wells. The ferocious black Arab nomad brandished a frightening curved sword; whacking the lumbering camel with the flat of the blade, he drove the beast into a faulty, staggering gallop across such endless sand dunes that the animal and its rider were soon only a speck on the vast horizon. Suddenly,
music!
Homer jumped.
Words!
The titles, the names of the actors were written in the sand by an invisible hand.